Back to the regular rhythm of a Kilkenny Arts Festival, with some ‘gateway drugs’ to open it up

“A lot of people who’d never dream of going to an opera, who didn’t think they’d like opera,” were surprised, when introduced at Elektra “We like to see if there is a way for audiences to not have barriers to trying other things. The more we do stuff where people think they don’t like something … that really rocks my world. It’s that gateway drug thing. The first one is free.”

Olga Barry, director of Kilkenny Arts Festival, is talking about putting together a programme, just as her line-up for this year’s festival, on August 4th-14th, is unveiled on Thursday. Irish National Opera’s (INO) Elecktra, outdoors in Castle Yard last year was one “gateway”; another was when “several hundred people heard a great piece of music by Stravinsky in 2019 because they came to see Ciarán Hinds [in The Soldier’s Tale]. It’s that way of bringing an art form, or bringing you a version of an art form, that you might think you don’t like.” She’s on a roll. “So opera, what is opera anyway? The rules have changed about all that.”

This year INO is making Out of the Ordinary, a new virtual reality, community opera. Directed by Jo Mangan and composed by Finola Merivale, it’s being created as a community music project on Inis Meáin, in Tallaght and in South County Dublin, where people are turning experiences that matter to them into opera, with Irish VR expertise helping realise their vision. (INO has had, says Barry, “the single biggest positive impact on the arts … All the things people talk about, opera needing to become a living, breathing thing again. They’re doing it, and VR is just one element of that.”

Barry delights that in the same festival “somebody can put on a headset, and have a VR contemporary opera experience in a school gym for 40 minutes, but then they can also get to the three-hour Semele: opera with all the bells and whistles, acoustic music from the height of the Baroque”. Semele sees Opera Collective Ireland and the festival collaborating with world-renowned Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin for what’s been described as “Handel’s sexiest opera”; the William Congreve libretto is based on salacious passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For it, Tony-winning director Patrick Mason and conductor Christian Curnyn are working with young singers in Belfast-based vocal ensemble Sestina.

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Olga Barry was hardly director a wet weekend — well, one festival down — when Covid struck. For two years it was “what can I make meaningfully and what can survive in the pandemic?” Now she’s fired up for her first full-scale festival since 2019, and looking further ahead, with “long form thinking”. She wants to “engage with the city because the city is changing”. That includes exploring CCTV and surveillance and the fears that lead to them, for next year.

The festival’s creativity is of the city, its character and fabric, as well as using the city as a canvas, she says. “It’s informing work, hopefully, in the way the Nore is informing Luke’s piece this year.” This is Luke Murphy’s Raft, on a pontoon on the river, reflecting a community’s relationship with a body of water “in a landlocked county”. “We can all be a bit afraid of dance, apart from maybe traditional Irish. There’s something about the ordinariness of it being a sitting room on the raft, with very beautiful dance made for it. But also, in the spine of Kilkenny city, where you’ll witness it.” Murphy is “a major game changer in the idea of what dance can be, how we can connect with people. I don’t mean to suggest this is like a gateway drug, but this allows you to consider dance without really considering dance.” (There we go again!)

Murphy’s stunning and highly original Volcano, a Galway International Arts Festival hit last year, has just won four Irish Times Theatre Awards, including best production. Raft will be seen by many more people, as they pass by or sit on the new river walkways in the new Abbey Quarter, where the pontoon floats between two new bridges. Raft is of the city rather than just in it, drawing attention to what we take for granted.

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The castle too. “Something I notice, as a non-native: we kind of forget about the castle. Till something reminds you, this extraordinary castle is right there.” Kilkenny City Council has been proactive creating accessible outdoor places, says Barry, creating “a dynamism around changing how we live in the city centre as a medieval, structured city.”

Doing Shakespeare in the Castle Park this year (rather than CastleYard), is “as much about people who aren’t going to go to Shakespeare seeing us make it. That structure will be sitting there for the full 10 days, whether you’re going to the play or not. The stage will look a little bit like an installation.” And in that installation will rise The Tempest: Rough Magic, the glorious Eleanor Methven as Prospero, directed by Lynne Parker (best director in the theatre awards, for Solar Bones in Kilkenny 2019).

A bit out of town, Callan too is “reimaging itself but from the inside”. This year Asylum Productions (who memorably took over the town for The Big Chapel X in 2019) present a work-in-progress festival co-production, The Local, lamenting the demise of the quintessential Irish ‘democratic space’, the local pub, through the prism of Italia ‘90. Next year will see a full community cast alongside a professional team, for a site-specific show in an abandoned pub. Also of the place will be Loosysmokes’ In Rhythms, aerial and acrobatic spectacle, but in an agricultural shed outside town, underlining “Kilkenny is a rural city”.

Barry, originally from Cork, and now fully plugged into Kilkenny, observes “I think Kilkenny is a place that people have to rear their young to leave, and hope they want to come back to raise their children.” With no third-level college (the new South East Technological University in Waterford and Carlow notwithstanding), “what will make people resettle aged 30 if they’ve spent 10 years in Dublin, Cork, London, New York? I’m profoundly of the view it is the city having a sense of frisson. Things happen here. The festival ecology throughout the year lends itself very much to that.” She reels off the long list of Kilkenny festivals.

“If you were growing up in Kilkenny, you’d think, of course I want to come back and choose to live here as an adult. There’s not many towns in Ireland can do that and I think it’s the arts that makes it a living city, with the right amount of energy coming from the local authority. The more things we can do out of the ordinary, the more we’re contributing to and celebrating Kilkenny’s sense of itself. The castle shouldn’t just sit there as a monument to good restoration. Messy things like making theatre or making art need to happen in it. Kilkenny is lucky it welcomes that.”

Its classical programme is a festival pillar. This year “we are sort of having a mezzo soprano festival”. Sharon Carty performs with Irish Chamber Orchestra, a new work by Deirdre Gribbin, with text by her son, Ethan Stein, a young poet with Down Syndrome.

Ailish Tynan, “one of our absolute best” is doing “a kind of potboiler opera selection”, also with ICO. “We have Tara Erraught, the next best thing to come out of Ireland in opera” in The Trials of Tenducci at St. Canice’s Cathedral with Irish Baroque Orchestra, who are “reframing what we think baroque is, and the core Irish historic repertoire that was a big deal in the baroque, when Dublin was the second city. It’s very much in our DNA of musical heritage.”

Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and the Irish Chamber Orchestra will perform Róisín ReImagined. “She wouldn’t call herself a mezzo but her voice has been through such an extraordinary transformation since her young days as a traditional singer. I don’t think anybody else could have taken on this, breathing new life into sean nós songs, reimagined as art songs A great Irish voice of a different tradition again. Ireland produces more top class singers than you could shake a stick at, frankly.”

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Alongside such strong singers and ensembles, comes another mezzo: Anne Sophie von Otter with Brooklyn Rider performing Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and Winterreise songs, plus the European premiere of new songs Rufus Wainwright wrote for them. “She’s a wonderful interpreter of song”, on “one of the world’s greatest instruments, mezzo soprano”.

Olga Barry wondered for a moment, was it a risk, “having so many singers fronting so much of the classical programme. But they’re all individually distinct in their repertoire and their approach.”

And multiple women’s voices, too. “It wasn’t conscious, it wasn’t by design. And yet, we designed it.” The indie Rollercoaster Sessions also have a strong female presence in its thread of “very singular voices”, including young, Irish based artist Maija Sofia, art-pop four-piece Bas Jan, and actor-singer Keeley Forsyth’s Irish debut (also in Rollercoaster are Sean O’ Hagan and Myles O’Reilly).

Amergín and the Tuath Princess brings together poet-in-residence Theo Dorgan and composer Colm Mac Con Iomaire, at the intersection between the outsider poet arriving by sea and encountering the Tuath Dé Dannan; Bríd Ní Neachtain is Amergín and Aaron Monaghan Tuatha, with a seven-piece ensemble led by Mac Iomaire.

Much of the work in Kilkenny has been long in development, but probably none moreso than Kevin Atherton’s The Return at Butler Gallery. Part of the three-part installation involves him ‘re-entering’ Boxing Re-Match, a video/film projection he made in 1972, for a sort of conversation with his younger self. All three video installations in The Return involve revisiting an older work. “He’s very interested in how the audience engages with his work. It’s not a passive thing.”

Getting into gear for August, Barry talks about being able to return to “the rhythm of the day” of a Kilkenny festival. A gallery after breakfast, Shostakovich at lunchtime, perhaps a talk in the afternoon, before theatre at night. “The idea that you spend the day around the city. The classical music in the early part of that day sets the pace for the day for a lot of our audience. My mission, if you like, has been to diversify the kinds of experiences people have.”

The Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from August 4th-14th

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